Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/500

 478 HISTORY OF GREECE. bers and back-chambers of the various temples. Dionysius dis- tributed the busy multitude into convenient divisions, each with some eminent citizen as superintendent. Visiting them in person frequently, and reviewing their progress, he recompensed largely, and invited to his table, those who produced the greatest amount of finished work. As he farther offered premiums for inventive skill, the competition of ingenious mechanists originated several valuable warlike novelties ; especially the great projectile engine for stones and darts, called Catapulta, which was now for the first time devised. We are told that the shields fabricated during this season of assiduous preparation were not less than one hundred and forty thousand in number, and the breast-plates fourteen thou- sand, many of them unrivalled in workmanship, destined for the body-guard and the officers. Helmets, spears, daggers, etc., with other arms and weapons in indefinite variety, were multiplied in corresponding proportion. 1 The magazines of arms, missiles, machines, and muniments of Avar in every variety, accumulated in Ortygia, continued stupendous in amount through the whole life of Dionysius, and even down to the downfall of his son. 2 If the preparations for land-warfare were thus stupendous, those for sea-warfare were fully equal, if not superior. The docks of Syracuse were filled with the best ship-builders, carpenters, and artisans ; numerous wood-cutters were sent to cut ship-timber on the well-clothed slopes of -ZEtna and the Calabrian Apennines ; teams of oxen were then provided to drag it to the coast, from whence it was towed in rafts to Syracuse. The existing naval establishment of Syracuse comprised one hundred and ten tri- remes ; the existing docks contained one hundred and fifty ship- houses, or covered slips for the purpose either of building or hous- ing a trireme. But this was very inadequate to the conceptions of Dionysius, who forthwith undertook the construction of one hundred and sixty new ship-houses, each competent to hold twr vessels, and then commenced the building of new ships of Avar to the number of two hundred ; Avhile he at the same time put all 1 Diodor. xiv, 42, 43. The historian Philistus had described with much minuteness these war- like preparations of Dionysius. Diodorus has probably abridged from him (Fhilisti Fragment, xxxiv, ed. Marx and ed. Didot.)
 * Plutarch. Timoleon, c. 13.